You really want to write a book, but you have gotta blog first.

The South Asian Journalists Association will convene at Columbia University from June 17 through June 20 for its annual convention. If you haven't signed up and registered for it, you will be missing a real treat. Lots of wonderful speakers and panelists. If you are out to network you couldn't ask for a more congenial atmosphere. While the focus is journalism and South Asia, those who are interested in one or the other but not necessarily both should still choose to attend. Convention information here. Registration information here.

I manage the PHOTOFORUM, the photojournalism activities during the convention. If you haven't responded to the Call For Entries for the annual digital photo exhibit, tick-tock, the count-down to the May 31 deadline looms ahead. Consider submitting your photography. After all when was the last time you showed off your work to 600 journalists?

The Photoforum workshops this year is an attempt to provide some “hands-on” photography training to participants at the convention. David H. Wells, an internationally known photojournalist and a highly regarded teacher will lead two workshops. Click the link below to find out more about the workshops and about David. Plan to attend both!

Please bookmark this link to come back and check for updates. All events and activities are subject to change.

Workshop: A Day In Jackson Heights, June 17, 2004 (Thursday) 9.00 a.m to 4.00 p.m.

Jackson Heights in the New York City borough of Queens is a vibrant community housing immigrants from Latin America and South Asia. Our workshop – A Day in Jackson Heights – will attempt to document the lives of South Asians from different walks of life.

Please come prepared with a digital camera, 2 memory cards, extra batteries, good walking shoes, your photo ID , a cell phone and IDEAS! If your camera is capable of taking more than one lens, bring along those as well. Digital images you have produced will be eventually burned to a CD and mailed to you.

If you are using a film-based camera, please bring 10 rolls of film (4-200 ISO, 4-400 ISO and 2-800 ISO) and extra batteries as well. Please be aware that if you shoot with film you will be responsible for the cost of processing and scanning your images onto a CD.

Please be advised that this is not a workshop about how to use your particular type of camera. We will expect you to know how to properly handle your camera/lenses. This workshop is meant to give you an idea of how photojournalists work; the approach and choices that are pursued and the qualitative results that can be shared at an exhibit. For an example of the kind of work we hope you can produce, click here:

Our Schedule:

9.00 a.m. – Meet as a group at the front of the Journalism school on the Columbia University campus
9.15 a.m. – (SHARP) After a brief introduction, the group departs for Jackson Heights on the subway
10.15 a.m. – Arrive in Jackson Heights. Group splits into different directions to shoot
1.00 p.m. – Meet at Jackson Diner for lunch (on your own)
2.00 p.m. – Back to our subjects or more street shooting
5.00 p.m. – Gather at the subway station, drop off memory cards/film, fill out workshop evaluations and head back to Columbia University

Between 8.00 a.m and 5 p.m. participants can approach David H. Wells for instruction, advice or suggestions on how to approach your subject and document their life.

As your memory cards fill up, you will be expected to drop it off with the workshop manager. His name is Seshu Badrinath and his cell phone number is: 617-821-7993. David's cell phone number is: 401 261 4528. Your digital images will be placed in folders that have your names on them. The images will be edited for content and quality. On Saturday (June 19th), during the SAJA convention's gala dinner, the selected images will be shared with other conventioneers as part of the annual SAJA PHOTOFORUM exhibit and eventually published to the SAJA PHOTOFORUM web site (www.sajaphotoforum.org).

Useful Links to Jackson Heights:

Jackson Heights history
Jackson Heights history
Getting There
Lunch @ Jackson Diner

Should you need to contact the Police in Jackson Heights for any reason –

Police
92-15 Northern Blvd.
Jackson Heights, NY 11372
Tel. (718) 533-2002

Workshop: Visualizing Globalization, June 18, 2004 (Friday) 3.45 pm. to 5.15 p.m.

Spend an afternoon with David H. Wells, a freelance photojournalist and Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow who recently finished an extended photo-essay exploring globalization in India. Wells will first show his work, starting off with two earlier photo-essays, one on the pesticide poisoning of farm workers in California and the other exploring complexities of Palestinian-Israeli interaction. In each of these projects, as in the project on globalization, identifying the issue was relatively easy while pre-visualizing, locating, accessing and actually photographing visually interesting aspects of the story was much harder. These are the special skills that Wells brings to all of his projects and it is the skills he will share with you.

Bring a list of potential story ideas to the workshop. Wells will talk about a selected few. He will discuss how he would separate out the non-visual from the visual as well as discussing how to turn the less than visually stimulating ideas into highly visual very interesting story ideas.

David H. Wells' book project in development is tentatively titled “Globalization in India: Winners and Losers.” To see the full book dummy go here. Wells is seeking a writer to collaborate with in order to expand and complete the book as well as a publisher to produce and disseminate the book. You can reach him directly at: david@davidhwells.com

About Our Instructor:

David H. Wells is a photojournalist with over twenty five years' experiences in photography. Between 1980 and 1985 he worked for a series of small, medium and large newspapers (San Francisco Examiner, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Los Angeles Times among them) trying to find a place in the world of newspaper photojournalism. Since 1986 he has focused on in-depth photo-essays for publication and exhibition. His photo-essays have been published in Saudi Aramco World, the Chicago
Tribune, Geo Magazine, Life Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, National Geographic Publications, Newsweek Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine, Time Magazine, U.S. News & World Report and the Washington Post Magazine, among other
publications.

Wells has extensive work experience in India, working on assignment for Saudi Aramco World and the Ford Foundation, among others, during numerous trips to India between 1995 and 1999. Wells spent five months in India in 1999-2000 on a Fulbright fellowship. He made 8 trips to India over 18 months in 2000 to 2002 on a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which enabled him to complete his extended photo essay on globalization in India.

Wells‚ photographs have been shown in over forty exhibitions across America and overseas. His work has been featured in one-person exhibits at the University of Rhode Island, London‚s Gallery Ezra, the Centro Colombo-Americano of Medellin, Colombia, Brown University, University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. His work has been included in group exhibits at the Jerusalem campus of Hebrew Union College, the Rapprochement Center of Bet Sahur, Visa pour l'Image Photojournalism Festival, Perpignan, France, and the Museo Bardini of Florence, Italy.

His work has been published AS in portfolios in American Photographer, American Photography Four, Camera and Darkroom, Camera Arts, Communication Arts Photography Annual, Graphis: The Human Condition, Nikon World, Photo District News, Photo Magazine (France), Photographers International (Taiwan), Photo Techniques, Zoom (Italy).

His work is in collections including the Jewish Museum of New York City, Light Work Photography Center of Syracuse, NY, McGraw-Hill Collection of New York City, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company of New York City, the National Center for Photography as an Art Form of Bombay, India, the Price-Waterhouse Collection of New York City and the Santa Barbara, California, Museum of Art.

Wells was born in Albany, New York in 1956 and has a Bachelor of Arts in the Liberal Arts with a concentration in the history of photography from Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges, Claremont, CA, 1979.

“The Australian PhotoJournalist is a non-profit publication compiled at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and focuses on social documentary photography and photojournalism.

Each edition is dedicated to one topic which is thoroughly investigated and presented to our readership. This issue will celebrate journalism that has made or is making a difference to the world in which we live.

But where to begin, the possibilities are so numerous that we have decided to begin this project by contacting people such as yourself who have received the respect of the industry and ask which journalists (photo or text) you believe we should consider. Our intention is to gather a breadth of data and then begin the selection and investigation process.

We hope to go to press in late July for an August edition of the APJ. As such whatever help you could extend to us in the next one or two weeks would be enormously appreciated.”

Send your ideas to Steve Kerr at APJ.

Thanks for reading this post. Now, close your eyes for 10 seconds. Done? What crossed your mind? You don't have to tell me. Just write them down on a piece of paper. Question is – what did you perceive – was it a single image, multiple images or images in motion?

I tend to see single images that do not move. Are we wired that way? These days when I close my eyes and think of the war in Iraq, Afghanistan or the tumultuous events in Pakistan, I have two visions – of both Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg getting their throats cut like a couple of goats during Bakrid. The imagery is obviously bloody and gruesome. It is meant to shock me. Does it not shock you? Are we all desensitized and accept them to be victims of war?

Do they debilitate us into inaction and self-loathing, or are we moved to get out there make some changes? What can be done? Call our representatives in our government? Join moveon.org? March on Washington, D.C.? What? Fill in the blanks. Your comments are as always welcome.

From Michael Browning at the Palm Beach Post

Click the link below if the paper has killed the link or archived it where you can't get to the text.

‘These photos bury words'
Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Wars have a way of reducing themselves to moments, single memories, tiny episodes.

Here, pictures have a thousand-to-one advantage over words.

The 10-year Vietnam War was summed up in four photographs:

Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams captured the instant in 1968 when South Vietnamese Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street. Nick Ut snapped a picture of Kim Phuc, a Vietnamese girl, fleeing naked down a highway in Vietnam after a napalm attack in 1972. Ron Haeberle took a picture of the limp bodies of the My Lai massacre victims after they were shot in 1968. John Filo caught Mary Ann Vecchio screaming over the body of a fellow student slain by National Guardsmen during a war protest at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970.

These photographs, it could be argued, tilted the whole balance of public opinion against the war. What occurred on the battlefield was rendered largely irrelevant by what occurred when certain photons massed themselves into images and rushed into the retinas and minds of the American public.

In the same way, the photos of Iraqi prisoners being tortured and humiliated at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad have delivered a grievous blow to American power and prestige worldwide. The tiny, glass eyes of digital cameras and what they witnessed have proved more shocking and awesome than all the shock-and-awe Cruise missiles and bunker-buster bombs launched and dropped at the start of the war.

It is impossible to escape the gloomy presentiment, that with this single series of pornographic eye-blinks, these cheap shots of cheap behavior, the entire war in Iraq has been summed up and may be irrevocably lost, or immeasurably lengthened, or both. The suspicions of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims toward the U.S. have surely been confirmed, sharpened, renewed and validated photographically.

A few nights of vulgar, cruel hijinks on the part of a handful of American soldiers in uniform have nearly set the sacrifices of thousands of U.S. servicemen and women at naught, imperiled the job of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and placed the Bush administration on the defensive. In some ways, we will have to start the war all over again now, from scratch.

Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson used to call such pictures “the decisive moment.”

“Susan Sontag once opined that photographs were useless without words accompanying them,” said Neal Ulevich, a retired AP photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize himself in 1977 for a picture of leftist students being lynched in Bangkok, Thailand.

“She was wrong. These photographs bury words. Shocking as they are, they left me with a feeling akin to vindication. They are astonishing proof of the power of the image to inform and clarify.

“To me, it is interesting that the really breathtaking images of war are usually the product of time. They come out of wars that last for years,” said Ulevich, who lives near Denver.

“Conflicts that are over in a week do not tend to produce the images of agelong value. There is not enough time. The first Gulf War did not produce ‘eternal' images. The current Iraq war has been percolating for more than a year now, and images of consequence are beginning to appear.

“While there is often an element of randomness or luck in the strongest of images, the photographer must be there at the right time. Even randomness and luck seem to need some time to germinate.”

‘The terrible reality of war'

Photography has marched arm-in-arm with war since its invention.

Hippolyte Bayard made a daguerrotype of the barricades of Paris after the 1848 revolution, but daguerrotypes required several minutes to make and were useless for action shots.

A technological improvement came with the invention of the wet collodion process, which spread light-sensitive silver iodide crystals on glass plates. Images could be easily multiplied, even though they still took a long time to make.

Using the wet collodion process, Felice Beato shot pictures of the Crimean War in the mid-1850s, and Matthew Brady and his staff photographed the battlefields of the Civil War, often within a few hours of the actual battle. Photographs of the dead at Antietam in 1862 shocked Americans when they were displayed at his New York studio.

“Mr. Brady has done something to bring us the terrible reality and earnestness of the war,” wrote a reporter for The New York Times. “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along (our) streets, he has done something very like it.”

Wet plates were replaced by gelatin-coated dry plates around 1880 and the invention of halftone printing enabled photographs to be reprinted in newspapers in the 1890s. Hand-held cameras with spooled film arrived by the turn of the last century, enabling photographs of the Spanish-American War, the Mexican Revolution and the second Anglo-Boer War.

The motion-picture camera was invented in 1891 by Thomas Edison, making war films possible. One of the first combat scenes to be filmed was World War I's Battle of the Somme in 1915.

This movie, only seconds long, which is run on a continuous loop at the Imperial War Museum in London today, shows British soldiers going “over the top” of a trench to attack well-entrenched Germans across no man's land. One man doesn't even make it to the top. He is killed as soon as his head emerges, and he slides back down, limp, against the trench parapet. This film was screened in British theaters, but it proved so shocking that the government quickly suppressed it and clamped down hard on war photography during World War I. As a result, the conflict is remembered more in paintings than in photographs.

By 1913, smaller, lighter cameras such as the 35mm Leica, the 120mm Rolleiflex and the single-lens-reflex Contax enabled photographs to be taken at eye level, without exposing the photographer to prolonged enemy fire. They also opened photography to amateurs, even to soldiers themselves. German soldiers took their Leicas with them when they marched into Russia in World War II and took thousands of shocking photographs of massacres and murdered Jews.

“If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough,” war photographer Robert Capa used to say. In 1954, Capa got too close. He stepped on a land mine in Indochina and died in the explosion, aged 40.

The digitalized moment

Still photography still trumps movies of war. Motion pictures are diffuse, streaming by their very nature. The single image captures the decisive moment with absolute unified clarity. There is nothing beyond its borders. It is all there is: Take it or leave it.

Digital photography, pioneered in the 1980s, has resulted in cameras so tiny they fit in a shirt pocket and seldom err in exposure or focus. No film is necessary, so the image is completely unmediated. No one can halt it or thwart it. No film processor at a one-hour-photo lab can call the police, alert the Pentagon or notify the FBI. There is no time, no opportunity to destroy a negative, because there is no negative.

The tap of a finger, the push of a button, completes the picture completely. Digital photography thus offers an uncensored look at the world, which can then be flashed over the Internet instantly.

This is what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison. Behavior got out of hand, and digital cameras got into the hands of people who doubtless now wish they'd never heard of such instruments.

The camera literally broke the chain of command. Wishes became deeds. Deeds became pictures. These pictures have wrought immense mischief. The acts were terrible, but the pictures are themselves innocent, because pictures seldom lie, no matter how often they are accused of lying.

Rather, they expose lies. The camera never apologizes. That is left to us to do.

michael_browning@pbpost.com

“The long knives are out for the people at the top who blindly pursue their military missions without due regard for basic human rights of people in the occupied territories.”

Lynndie England's impassive, perhaps disdainful, or even contemptible gaze hovering over an Iraqi detainee on a long leash will most likely be the most remembered image from the “war on terror.”

Bernie Goldbach in his blog, IrishEyes calls for the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. Does the buck really stop there, though?

Via John Laxmi

Susan Sontag who wrote a brilliant but somewhat long winded analysis of photography's use and effects on society in her seminal book, On Photography has written the cover story for this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. The story titled, Regarding the Torture of Others, questions the recent spate of photographs of US soldiers in Iraq abusing detainees in the most horrendous of ways.

I will post my thoughts as soon I have had a chance to read it.

You would have to be living in a cave if you haven't heard about the atrocities involving US soldiers and Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. While it isn't yet known if the torture of the prisoners has resulted in more than a few deaths, I can imagine this is the start of a vicious cycle quite like the debacle in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. You kill one of mine. I kill two of you. And on and on, back and forth it goes on for ever. It gets to a point for the lay person that no one side is better than the other.

I have that same problem now between the Democrats and the Republicans. There is sufficient evidence that the Clinton administration dropped the ball on keeping track of Osama bin Laden. The 9/11 disaster could have been prevented if our “intelligence” community had actually done their job. And surprise, surprise, it's that same intelligence gathering agency that delivered the raison d'etre to “liberate” Iraq; claiming that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction. Did Saddam Hussein use nerve gas on the Kurds living in Northern Iraq? Of course he did. But whether these WMD's existed at all or in quantities that the CIA (or our old friend Ahmad Chalabi) suggested is seriously doubtful. So there goes our excuse for even being in the area. Was Hussein a brutal dictator who wreaked havoc in people's lives? Absolutely. But have we forgotten Indonesia's Suharto and North Korea's Kim Jong Il? You haven't seen the US making a bee line to those countries have you? So, why depose one dictator you have been supporting all along and neglect the others? It seems way too convenient.

There has to be another reason for being out there in Iraq. To most of us, with our mortgages, our soccer practices and our backyard barbecues, “out there” is so far away that we couldn't give a hoot about it. But I wonder if Americans, with their gas guzzling SUV's or eighteen-wheeled trucks, who have to deal with already escalating gas prices will wake up from their stupor and take some action. For some being in Iraq IS taking that action – ensuring that oil prices are controlled less by OPEC and more by Americans. Is this cynical or conspiratorial? I think not. Neo conservatives will claim that rising gas prices will cause the world's greatest economy to falter. When the US economy sputters, the rest of the world feels the pain too. That we are intricately tied to one another is pretty clear. The question in my mind is, at what point does our agenda for a free, prosperous, democratic life impinge on the lives of others living in this world with us? And at what point does that effect on other countries and people ripple right back to us?

Check the gas prices lately? They are going up, not down as one would have expected. Why you ask? Well, the Bush administration is clearly mucking things up in Iraq. The Americans do not have a handle on the insurgency. The administration's efforts are spiraling out of control to a point where the June 30 hand-off to a yet unnamed presumably “democratic” group will really have to be called a “retreat” in the world's history books. The confidence and limited supply of trust the Middle East heaps on the US has made it very difficult to succeed. Already our actions in the region have triggered a ghastly bombing in Madrid. Which city in the world will be next? The few countries that joined the US (called the “coalition”) are starting to back paddle and exit Iraq, a country they had little to do with in the first place. Even Secretary of State and former General in the US Army, Colin Powell has made remarks suggesting his misgivings towards the war in Iraq.

Let's be sure there is a broader definition of the war in Iraq as opposed to the war against terrorism. The Bush administration has attempted unsuccessfully to marry both wars. It's unconvincing and in the minds of those who have lost family and friends in the 9/11 disaster, it should wholly unforgivable. While I have great respect for those who honorably serve in the armed forces, I have nothing but disdain for politicians and their ilk whose sole aim is to push an agenda that is disruptive to world peace. Almost 800 men and women have died serving in the US army. Untold number of people have died in Iraq and other places where US agenda has prevailed.

Years from now when the political spectrum has shifted we will have to reassess and rethink our international policies. Or, perhaps we need to do it now.

By Charles R. Larson, Chair, Dept. of Literature
American University, Washington, D.C. 20016

Kamala Markandaya, the Indian novelist, died in London, Sunday, May 18, 2004. Born Kamala Purnaiya in Mysore in 1924, she attended the University of Madras, beginning in 1940, where she studied history. From 1940 to 1947, she worked as a journalist and also published short stories in Indian newspapers, eventually emigrating to England in 1948. There she met her husband, Bertrand Taylor, by whom she had one daughter. Fame and success came with her first published novel, Nectar In A Sieve (1954), a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection and best-seller in the United States. That novel was follow by nine others, including A Handful Of Rice(1966), The Nowhere Man (1972), Two Virgins (1973), and The Golden Honeycomb (1977).

Markandaya was often linked to other Anglo-Indian novelists at mid-point in the twentieth century, including Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, and Khushwant Singh, though she was the only female of the group. That special sensitivity demarcated all of her work, especially Some Inner Fury (1955) and Two Virgins. Readers of her novels, however, were more often struck by the tensions her characters encountered when they left the rural areas for the cities. Her two most popular novels, Nectar In A Sieve and a Handful Of Rice where taught in hundreds of American courses, both in the public shools and the universities.

Always a very private person, Markandaya granted few interviews and intentionally kept out of the limelight. After 1948, England became her home, with frequent trips back to India in order to find the necessary
inspiration for her writing. She is survived by her daughter, Kim Oliver.

Just received Photo District News‘ Photo Annual. Slightly thicker than the usual monthly installment, this issue is packed with some amazing photography. I'll dive into it and see if there are any gems to share with you. Several frames from Ami Vitale's work in Kashmir are included. If you are in a rush, though, check the gallery PDN has posted online.